Customize Your Sidebar and Limit Front Matter Templates to Sections

Another week full of new features! While the marketing team launched the Blocks theme uBuild for Jekyll and Hugo, the development team kept working on new product features.

Making the sidebar configurable was really high up on your wish list and this week we made it happen. Some of you also wanted to limit access to Front Matter Templates to specific content sections. You can do that now, too.

Let’s look at a few examples and feel free to open up your code editor and follow along.

All of your sidebar configurations are organized in your settings.yml under sections/collections depending on whether you use Hugo or Jekyll. So let’s go ahead and open that file.

Hide Sections 🙈

Some sections of a site are not important for content editing purposes, so they shouldn’t add clutter to your content manager!

You can now decide which sections are visible by using our hidden tag. Also, your content sections will appear in the exact order you specify them under sections/collections.

For Jekyll:

collections:
- path: _posts
hidden: true

For Hugo:

sections:
- path: content/posts
hidden: true

Switch Labels 🏷️

Sometimes your directory names might not be ideal outside a development environment. That’s why you can now choose to rename the labels of your content sections without changing the name of the directory itself.

For Jekyll:

collections:
- path: _posts
label: Blog

For Hugo:

sections:
- path: content/posts
label: Blog

Assign Front Matter Templates to Sections 👈👆👉

Until now every time you created new content you would have to choose from a long list of Front Matter Templates. That wasn’t ideal and bogged content editors down.

Now you can assign one or more Front Matter Templates to a specific content section and only expose them for that section. You can even provide them in an order you specify.

For Jekyll:

collections:
- path: _posts
templates:
- post
- article

For Hugo:

sections:
- path: content/posts
templates:
- post
- article

If you only add one template to a section, that template will be pre-selected and we won’t show the dropdown anymore.